Kim Jong Un

Here’s some unsolicited advice for right-of-center Trump critics or skeptics: Tune into MSNBC’s Deadline: White House for just a few minutes and it’ll turn you into the biggest Trump supporter on the planet. That was the case for anyone who tuned into Thursday’s show with host Nicolle Wallace leading a panel exhibiting why they want President Trump to fail and insinuated that he only cares about the midterm elections and not the safe return of three North Korean hostages.

Before meeting with North Korea's "very honorable" (Trump's words) dictator, Kim Jong-Un, the president should bone up on the history of that country's duplicity and deception, including ways it has used the wishful thinking of some past U.S. presidents to achieve its objectives. A good place to start is an essay written by Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute for the March 2003 issue of Commentary magazine.

All three networks on Friday trumpeted the “historic” breakthrough in North Korea, touting “peace at last!” In total, ABC, CBS and NBC devoted 26 minutes and 10 seconds of coverage to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visiting South Korea. Yet, of that time, a scant 76 seconds (all on CBS) was allowed for pondering what credit Donald Trump deserves.

People on April 27 awoke to the astounding news and images of the historic summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea at the border truce village of Panmunjom. Although it is an extremely upbeat story perhaps signalling permanent peace on the Korean peninsula after 65 years of uneasy armistice, the mood on the Morning Joe set was about as joyful as a funeral parlor. Joe Scarborough gave very grudging credit to President Donald Trump but every such word he uttered seemed quite painful as you are about to see. He was followed by regular panelist John Heilemann who seemed to be about ready to burst out crying as he reported this would give Trump the opportunity to say he was proven right.

In a remarks late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump revealed the United States was in high-level talks directly with the North Korean government and had given the okay for South Korea to negotiate an official end to the decades-long state of war. These were major developments on the world stage but the evening broadcasts of ABC, CBS and Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo flat out ignored them. Only NBC Nightly News thought it was important enough to inform their viewers about.

Here is a tale of three headlines. Think of the first two facts as "apples" about about the visit of North Korea leader Kim Jong Un to China to meet the president of that nation, Xi Jinping. And then consider the third headline as a "banana" reflecting the spin control CNN tried to toss in order to express their antipathy towards President Donald Trump.

A fundamental rule of modern American politics is that every Trump rally produces an equal, opposite media panic. The President put the pedal to the floor on Saturday during a speech in Pennsylvania, and so the reaction from Joe Scarborough and others on Monday’s Morning Joe was predictably hysterical.

Of all the absurd takes on the U.S.–North Korean situation in the wake of President Trump's tentative, conditional agreement to meet with Kim Jong Un, Barbara Demick's Friday "analysis" piece at the Los Angeles Times has to be near the top of any "worst" list. The headline: "Whatever comes next, North Korea's Kim Jong Un can claim a win against Trump." Oh really?

At the New York Times it is mandatory that President Donald Trump receive little or no credit for his accomplishments. This seems to be especially true about the Thursday announcement that Trump will be meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by May. The Times columnist, Max Fisher, went out of his way to emphasize not only in his Thursday column (which must have been hastily written since the announcement came at 7 PM that day) but also in a series of tweets that Trump just wasn't following proper diplomatic protocol.

When the startling news broke late Thursday that President Trump had accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the media intelligentsia begrudgingly shifted their focus away from the Stormy Daniels controversy. But with the leak of an e-mail sent by Trump’s lawyer from his Trump Organization account, they leapt on the excuse to return to their preferred topic.

After some liberal journalists initially praised President Trump’s willingness to meet with murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, a number of them remembered later Thursday night that they’re members of The Resistance. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was one such lefty, telling host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word that Trump has made “a dangerous gamble,” despite Kristof’s past encouragement for direct talks and engagement.

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